[
    {
        "id": 209422,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1982",
        "page_number": 79,
        "title": "RAS-1982",
        "content_text": "57\n\nany supporters to give his words more weight. In other words: there were no political parties which might have mustered support for one cause or another and through which persons not eligible to vote might have been represented at a Public Meeting.\n\nMoreover Public Meetings were in principle held only once a year to discuss matters of a financial and municipal nature. Only if there were other important affairs for which approval of the ratepayers was necessary, would more meetings be convened.\n\nAnd there lay the second defect, and a very glaring one when compared to parliamentary systems in Europe or America.\n\nApart from the annual meeting, the Municipal Council was irresponsible in the sense that it did not regularly have to answer questions about its policy.\n\nLikewise information about the sessions and policy making of the Municipal Council was considered too scarce and meaningless. Until 1860 no minutes were published if ever they were taken, which is not certain. It was only after the Herald, in its issue of October 13, 1860, had accused the Municipal Council of negligence with regard to a big fire on Nanking Road, that the newly appointed municipal secretary, Edwin Pickwoad, offered to release the council minutes for publication.\n\nFor a time the minutes, as well as committee reports and annual reports were published in the North China Herald, until in 1908 the Municipal Council decided to issue its own bulletin, the Shanghai Municipal Gazette, first in English only, but afterwards also in Chinese.\n\nBut the value of these minutes as a true insight into the decision-making process of the Municipal Council was doubted from a very early stage, when the North China Herald wrote on October 29, 1864, with regard to plans for improvement of the Bund: \"The very brief allusions which are contained in the minutes of the Municipal Council meetings to the subjects which have been discussed, are not always intelligible to general readers. In many instances the object of publishing minutes, which we presume is to afford information regarding the current Municipal affairs, is completely defeated by this brevity\".",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 209423,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1982",
        "page_number": 80,
        "title": "RAS-1982",
        "content_text": "58\n\nJ. H. HAAN\n\nSeventy years later it was complained that \"official business in this important municipality is conducted in secret. Members of the Municipal Council are bound not to disclose matters discussed in meetings and no reporter of a local newspaper has ever attended a meeting of the Council. The Council does issue a so-called Municipal Gazette, probably the dullest official journal in the world, which contains brief reports usually starting out \"Notice is hereby given\" or \"I have the honour to convey\n\netc.\"\n100\n\nNow it is, of course, true that in Western countries with a parliamentary government, meetings of the cabinet or other governing bodies were (and are) not open to the public. But there the rulers were responsible to representatives of the people, be it in parliament or its local equivalent. Nothing of the kind happened in Shanghai, which apart from the other structural and institutional regulations which halted democracy as understood elsewhere, made the whole administrative system come to be looked upon as oligarchic.\n\nSummary\n\nSummarizing this article we might say that the Settlement government rested on a base which became increasingly outmoded in Western countries where democracy allowed ever more people to participate in politics. Franchise according to tax paid was gradually abolished in the West, but in the International Settlement at Shanghai it remained till the last day of its existence. In the beginning, consent of all residents was claimed to be the foundation of municipal government, but as time progressed the administration degenerated into an oligarchy with or without the negative implications which the term suggests. Political interest was low and nobody really tried to change the system. Though Justice Feetham published a massive report about the situation in the Settlement and offered valuable advice in 1931, nothing was done. Only in the heyday of Chinese nationalism were some minor facelifts agreed, without altering any of the fundamentals.\n\nIt was only after the return of the Settlement to China in 1943 and especially after the communist takeover in 1949 that",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212863,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1992",
        "page_number": 172,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "157\n\nsurviving members of the Ezra family still enjoy a favoured position in the Jewish community in Hong Kong.\n\nNevertheless, individual members of the family (or families, since there were several separate groups of Ezras in Shanghai) attracted notoriety from time to time. In 1918, criminal proceedings were instituted against Joseph Ezra and Ellis Isaac Ezra for using the launch owned by the Standard Oil Company without authorization. The same year, Joseph Ezra was summoned to court for assaulting a Mr Gordious Nielson, a Dane, who was the proprietor of the Shanghai Gazette, which had printed something that Joseph Ezra did not like. The South China Morning Post recorded a 1933 case whereby two men named Ezra, Judah and Isaac, were brought to court in San Francisco for smuggling narcotics. By 1933, the International Convention against opium had long since been signed.\n\n16\n\nNissim Ezra Benjamin Ezra, better known as N.E.B. Ezra, founded and edited the Anglo-Jewish weekly newspaper, Israel's Messenger from 1909 to 1935. This paper became the official organ of the Shanghai Zionist Association, taking issue with Sir Victor Sassoon and other Sephardic Jews in Shanghai over the issue of Zionism. The paper supported the Jewish National Fund in China. In 1921 the fund received a donation of 21,000 pounds sterling from a single donor in Shanghai. Since it was pro-Japanese, Chinese sources speculated that the Japanese had succeeded in buying the paper's editorial policy to favour Japanese imperial ambitions in Asia.\n\nSilas Hardoon\n\nSilas Hardoon alone among the Shanghai Jewry was not spoken of as a family. To the Chinese he was the most interesting Jew in Shanghai. There is so much information on him that it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Hardoon was a colourful as well as important personality. He was also very, very wealthy. He was elected to the Municipal Council of the International Settlement as well as the Conseil Municipal of the French Concession. Chinese tradition has it that the British made this Jewish parvenu pay for the honour of being a municipal councillor by shouldering the expenses of paving Nanking Road. Hardoon married a Chinese woman reputed to be of brothel origin, by Jewish and Buddhist rites. They adopted a number of Chinese and Eurasian children, rumoured to be from a dozen to twenty. The Chinese",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]